I GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGE THE support of the Arizona Council for the Arts, whose individual artist grant supported my travel to the homes and studios of solitaries, and to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. I express as well my appreciation to my colleagues at the University of Arizona Department of English, for accommodating leaves to research and write. A particular thanks to the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, and to Philip and Laurence Breeden and the Institut Américain Universitaire in Aix-en-Provence, for writing time and space in my beloved France.
I offer thanks to Alane Mason, my editor at Norton, for her encouragement of this sometimes reluctant mule; to Allegra Huston, my most excellent and attentive copyeditor; and to the staff at W. W. Norton, both in New York and in the field. I thank my agent, Ellen Levine, for her enduring support, and her patient and gracious assistant, Martha Wydysh. I acknowledge the contributions of my many manuscript consultants, chief among them Michael Baun, Melanie Beene, Richard Canning, Suzanne Marrs, Greg Miller, Paul Quenon, Lisa Rappoport, and Jean Rukkila. At Harper’s Magazine, Chris Beha and Ellen Rosenbush offered superb advice. I offer an especially deep bow to Shirley Abbott, deceased as these pages were going to print, in appreciation of her lifelong editorship and our epistolary love; sometimes I think it is the best kind. I hope the final version justifies my readers’ intelligence, labor, and love. They brought clarity to my writing and corrected many missteps; I am solely responsible for any that remain.
Portions of this book have been adapted from “Going It Alone: The Dignity and Challenge of Solitude,” which appeared in Harper’s Magazine, April 2015.
“All Serious Daring Begins Within: Eudora Welty” has been adapted from an essay of the same title that appeared in The Georgia Review, spring 2012.